Creative Control is a near-future story where our protagonist uses a new Augmented Reality technology to conduct an affair with his best friend’s girlfriend… or so he believes. It has already won one award on the Film Fest circuit. 10 Cloverfield Lane is supposed to be Sci-Fi from J.J.Abrams, but seems more like a monster movie when I look at the trailer. Not being a horror movie fan, I am going for the other one.
This week has radical scientist Victor Frankenstein, who along with his lab assistant sidekick Igor breathes new life into an old classic. And that’s it for western TV and Movies as far as I can tell.
Anime has Psycho-Pass 2, the cutting edge police procedural that brings predictive paranoia to a whole new level. Note that this one is just in time for you to binge watch it and make it to the theaters in a week to see the season finale in the form of Psycho-Pass the Movie. The Chinese historical epic Kingdom: The Complete Second Season is the retelling of a classic series of wars as multiple kings and generals all fought each other to unite over a hundred countries under their own banners. The artwork and style on this is quite nicely done, and the history is as accurate as you usually get when talking about a war that covered an entire continent for 500 years. Season 2 is 39 episodes long on top of season 1’s 38 episodes; considering this portion of the war lasted about 30 years, the last nine of which were the Qin’s wars of unification which founded the Qin Dynasty ruling a unified China in 221 B.C., this portion of the story was every bit as realistic as the gap between now and then would allow it to be. Finally, Wolf Girl & Black Prince didn’t turn out to be a fantasy about royalty employing werewolves in their wars as I had been hoping, but if you are looking for a little lite RomCom you might find it enjoyable.
Fate Gear seems to be a Steampunk Heavy Metal girl group from Japan, a concept that may take a bit of getting used to, for me at least. The first track is named the same as the band, Fate Gear, the second is Romancer. Mina plays guitar and writes the Music & Lyrics. She used to be with the band Destrose who also released the second track, and now is separate, at first just partnered with a great vocalist, but then they picked up a quality drummer to round out the group. While the songs presented here came out in the summer of 2015, they have a lot going on this year as well.
The Syfy show Halcyon will have 5 episodes made for VR about the VR saturated world of 2058, along with the 10 episodes made for standard TV. So far the only VR version announced will be for Oculus Rift, I am hoping they port it to Google Cardboard before the release date so everyone can watch it. No word yet on when the show will air (at least that I found), nor was I able to locate an on-line trailer.
NASA assembled this amazing video of the Sun in Ultra-HD (4K) from footage generated by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, and added some tasty music by Lars Leonhard to it. On top of that, the folks at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center decided to make this video public domain, posting it so it can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12034, along with several others. If they keep doing this, I might have to break down and buy myself a TV suitable for watching these on, and download the entire collection.
The SIGGRAPH 2016: Computer Animation Festival is the heart of what comes next for movies, games, and so much more. Watch and be amazed, and remember, no show gets more than 5 or 10 seconds of screen time! I would love to make this gathering in person and see each entire presentation come the 24th through the 28th of July 2016 in Anaheim, California.